In Charleston, South Carolina, there is a very good taco joint called Taco Boy. They've got one of the more engaging, beautiful dining spaces I've ever seen, with a sprawling beer-garden style outdoor seating area that has trees overhead and ivy covered trellis walls around it, and a breezy, open interior space if you prefer to dine indoors.

...is a glorious thing. The morning temperature is "light jacket," but during the day it scooches up into T-Shirt Territory. The trees are a riot of blossoms, and when the wind blows, they rain down on you like you're running out of a wedding chapel. Everyone's got that renewed zest for getting the hell outside.

Let's say I told you that you were going to take a child between the ages of 2 and 6ish on a trip with you, and you wanted to bike around once you got there. Nothing long distance, just tooling around the city, seeing the sights, going to museums, etc. How would you do it? What options spring to mind? Would you try to check a full-sized bike and a rear kid seat for it? Or, like most people, would you start googling bike rental options in the new city?

If you’re a bike shop who offers rental bikes, there’s good news: You are the “default” model for people who come to visit your town and want to borrow a bike. That’s a big advantage over your emerging competition, namely bike shares like Citibike (NYC), and online “new economy” sharing services like Spinlister.

New Belgium are purveyors of fine, fine beers, and are located in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a second facility now in Asheville, North Carolina. We at Bikabout were fortunate enough to be able to tour the Fort Collins site this past November, and it remains the best brewery tour we've ever taken. But before I explain why this modern craft brewery so richly deserves its own Bikabout blog post, I need to put "modern" and "craft" into context. It's important to understand where we came from, in order to understand why the place we are at now is so good, and why New Belgium perhaps best exemplifies that place.

With National Bike Month (May) right around the corner, now is the perfect time for curious lodging to make the leap into the bike tourism community.  Its all about the experience these days and nothing simultaneously gives the gift of elation, independence, efficient sightseeing and adventure like the bike does. Here are 5 tips on how you can provide guests with a biking experience of a lifetime.

Voted “Best Used Book Store” 5 years in a row, Blue Bicycle Books was taken over by a former employee and his wife in 2007, and continues to delight readers on King Street 8 years later. The store opened in 1995 as Boomer’s Books, and has always offered knowledgable staff, a comfortable atmosphere, and a friendly shop cat to pet. Online book sellers don’t have shop cats.

When you have kids under a certain age, you tend to spend a great deal of time at playgrounds. It's a perfect mid-day diversion... the kids gets to run wild, everyone gets some fresh air, and when it's done you feel you've all "earned" an ice cream. With all that time to sit and contemplate your surroundings each time, it's natural that many parents begin to form opinions about what makes a good playground. Here are some of our favorite playgrounds from our travels, and more importantly, why we liked them so much...

Buses and bikes ought to be a match made in heaven, particularly with long distance buses that travel between cities. Those bigger buses have plenty of room in their cargo holds for bikes – especially folding bikes – and cyclists looking to easily extend their routes make great paying customers for bus lines. Why, then, is the experience of bringing a bike on a bus sometimes a baffling ordeal, or not even possible at all?

Bikabout.com has curated this list of museums because they roll out the red carpet for people biking, they are located along a scenic and comfortable route or they're just cultural landmarks not to be missed via two wheels or otherwise. Locations include Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver.

Bikabout founders tell you why a Brompton folding bike is worth the investment, how to carry your child on the Brompton and finally, offer the 101 on the three ways to fly with your Brompton: carry-on, gate check and luggage check.

With Bloomberg no longer at the helm in New York City, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has taken over the national spotlight as the most bike-progressive mayor of a major American city. And while the biking experience is not yet up to the level of the world's best biking cities, it is getting closer by the month due to Chicago's aggressive goals.

It’s Thanksgiving. You’ve probably traveled. Even if you didn’t descend upon someone else’s house, someone probably descended upon yours. The result is always the same: Come Friday after Thanksgiving, you’re ready to get out of whatever house you spent the prior day over-indulging in, and go do …something. Traditionally in America, this has meant waking up at an obscene pre-dawn hour to go wait in huge lines at big box stores to get a discount on a flat screen tv you didn’t exactly need. We at Bikabout feel there’s a better way to spend Black Friday.

Arriving in Vancouver and hopping onto a bike when you're used to places like Boston, your first thought is "this is what DONE looks like." Done arguing, done advocating, done waiting, done building... Vancouver looks and feels like a photoshopped "After" picture if you're a bike advocate. The water on all sides, the mountains tumbling over each other on every horizon, and those incredible bike paths everywhere... swoon.

To celebrate us publishing our first Bikabout route, "Artabout", we wanted to showcase the murals and other public art that graces neighborhood greenways and bike paths in cities.  We hope these inspire you to wander by bike!

Seattle has a location problem. It's sandwiched between Bicycle World darlings Portland and Vancouver, both of whom have deservedly hogged the lion's share of what precious little press space there is for bicycles in North American press. Right in between these two lies relatively ho-hum Seattle, ever the bridesmaid, never the bride. Arriving downtown (by train, naturally), one would be forgiven for failing to lift a finger to challenge that viewpoint, really. It remind me very much of the most buttoned-down parts of downtown Boston, but with massive, weapons-grade, "this is not cool" hills. Picture traffic, few trees, drunken Seahawks fans, concrete, and 1st gear hills that go on for 20 blocks.

Out of every city we have biked, Minneapolis is by far the best biking city in the U.S.  Between the "bicycle interstate highways" that get you where you need to go, water at every turn, the most bike racks per capita and normal folk riding bikes, this city provides a social, stress free and scenic city biking experience.

I am seriously biased when it comes to Madison WI because I was born in the Emerald City, also known as "X square miles surrounded by reality."   This city is jam packed with everything a Midwestern girl could want:  laid back ladies, farm-to-table food, theatrical thunderstorms, tasty beer, a decent Big 10 athletic department and most importantly, the lakes. 

Athens GA was our first stop on the Bikabout tour of 7 cities.  Although Megan Ramey, founder, and her husband attended UGA undergrad, she has never been more in love with the city's marriage of bike culture, art, food and Southern hospitality.